John Niedermeyer is a Brooklyn-based design manager and internets enthusiast at <a href="http://buzzfeed.com">BuzzFeed</a>. Previously, he was a digital designer and editor at <a href="http://nytimes.com">The New York Times</a>.

My photo from the 21st floor of the New York Times Building, in midtown.

A USAir­ways plane that took off at 3:26 p.m. from La Guardia Air­port land­ed in the Hud­son Riv­er five min­utes lat­er, where it remains most­ly sub­merged. Fer­ries and oth­er boats con­verged to help with a res­cue effort, as the plane drift­ed south. There was no imme­di­ate infor­ma­tion about the 151 peo­ple on board.

Accord­ing to Chan­nel 4 tele­vi­sion news, the plane, USAir­ways flight 1549, took off from LaGuardia Air­port at 3:26 p.m. was bound for Char­lotte, N.C. and had 146 pas­sen­gers and 5 crew mem­bers. The plane, accord­ing to the news report, may have hit a flock of birds. The pilot tried to return to the air­port when the plane fell into the Hud­son.

I watched from the 21st floor of the Times Build­ing, as the plan drift­ed south with the tide. I believe that the res­cue oper­a­tion com­plet­ed before it came into view, and it has since drift­ed out of view.

The plane did not break up on impact; divers, com­muter fer­ries and a lot of emer­gency per­son­nel are assist­ing with res­cue oper­a­tions. Every­one is report­ed to have sur­vived the crash and res­cue, as of this moment, but there are injuries. CNN is cur­rent­ly inter­view­ing pas­sen­gers, live on-air.

Well, that didnt’t take long – giv­en the suc­cess of Barack Obama’s dig­i­tal and design strat­e­gy in our recent pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, some­one was bound to, ahem… com­plete­ly rip him off, soon­er or lat­er.

Sur­pris­ing­ly, the most recent exam­ple is the cam­paign of Ben­jamin Netanyahu, the con­ser­v­a­tive Likud leader run­ning for prime min­is­ter of Israel. The Times reports:

The col­ors, the fonts, the icons for donat­ing and vol­un­teer­ing, the use of embed­ded video, and the social net­work­ing Face­book-type options — includ­ing Twit­ter, which hard­ly exists in Israel — all reflect a con­scious effort by the Netanyahu cam­paign to learn from the Oba­ma suc­cess.

Today’s edition of the New York Times.

I count myself lucky today, for scor­ing a copy of the paper before they ran out. Appar­ent­ly, the sit­u­a­tion is the same through­out the city, (though I’ve heard rumors of anoth­er 50,000 copy run).

In fact, there are a hun­dred or so peo­ple stand­ing on line out­side the Times head­quar­ters, wait­ing for a fresh deliv­ery of news, print­ed on dead trees.

A hundred or so people, waiting on line for today’s paper, in front of the Times headquarters in midtown.

Every­body wants a sou­venir of Obama’s vic­to­ry, and you know what makes a great sou­venir? That’s right, a news­pa­per. This is a pho­to of a line out­side the NYT build­ing on 40th Street of peo­ple waiting—for a news­pa­per!

I hope that peo­ple still come to the Times for more than just a sou­venir.

Sil­ver uses data analy­sis to track and weight polls, based on their his­tor­i­cal track records and method­olo­gies. What’s inter­est­ing is that he right­ly pre­dict­ed the out­come of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic pri­ma­ry race, while com­men­ta­tors at the time were talk­ing about a Hillary Clin­ton come­back.

So, do these posters have any impact on vot­ers? Not the spe­cif­ic images or mes­sages but cumu­la­tive­ly they are a grass­roots effort that excite through the show of col­lec­tive sup­port. What’s more, posters often appeal to per­son­al needs and emo­tions, not all rouse in the same way for every­one. Hav­ing many options allows par­ti­sans to engage as they choose. This show of sup­port goes in the plus col­umn for Barack Oba­ma.

The Wash­ing­ton Post has a page one sto­ry today on a pair of secret Bush Admin­is­tra­tion mem­os sent to the CIA, that explic­it­ly endorse the agency’s use of tor­ture tech­niques. It’s unclear who the leaks came from, but it appears that the mem­os addressed con­cerns expressed by then-CIA Direc­tor George Tenet:

The Times has an inter­est­ing (if not com­plete­ly point­less) info­graph­ic on pres­i­den­tial height and weight, in recent his­to­ry. I like that the sil­hou­ettes are all most­ly rec­og­niz­able – Jim­my Carter’s smile, Har­ry Truman’s spec­ta­cles and William Howard Taft’s bel­ly… fun­ny.

Invitation design for our party, Thursday night.

I couldn’t resist – Lisa and I are host­ing a V.P. Debate par­ty this Thurs­day night, so I whipped this invite up. The idea was to play up two of the more strik­ing ele­ments of the can­di­dates’ appear­ance: Sarah Palin’s bee­hive and eye­wear, and Joe Biden’s abnor­mal­ly large teeth.

The result is kind of awk­ward but fun. It looks like an elon­gat­ed John Ker­ry-sized head, but it’s not worth fuss­ing with the pro­por­tions at this point. Just go with it… I did.

UPDATE: The always charm­ing Emi­ly point­ed out a rather obvi­ous spelling mis­take in the design above. Can you find it?

Twit­ter found anoth­er inter­est­ing thing to do since acquir­ing Sum­mize this past sum­mer: they launched an Elec­tion 2008 feed, which dis­plays Twit­ter users thoughts on the elec­tion in real time. The scroll goes dizzy­ing­ly fast, but the pause on mouse-over is a nice touch.

Looks like the 360 Smith lux­u­ry con­do devel­op­ment is going to shut down my sub­way entrance, and severe­ly mess up the nice plaza in front:

Because the safe­ty of our cus­tomers is of utmost con­cern, this clo­sure will be in effect on a 24-hour, 7 days per week basis for 6–8 months (sub­ject to the progress of the con­struc­tion project)…

See outside.in for more his­to­ry of this con­tro­ver­sial devel­op­ment.

Can a type­face tru­ly rep­re­sent a pres­i­den­tial can­di­date? Yes­ter­day on the Times’Cam­paign Stops blog, Steven Heller invit­ed sev­er­al design­ers and crit­ics to com­ment on John McCain’s use of Opti­ma for cam­paign col­lat­er­al.

Is it dat­ed? Clas­sic? Does it con­vey strength? Or, quirk­i­ness? The replies run the gamut; many of them fun­ny or tongue-in-cheek. Michael Beirut notes the font’s resem­blance to the one used to carve the names on the Viet­nam Vet­er­ans Memo­r­i­al, and Matthew Carter mus­es about how the type­face will hold up with the addi­tion of a run­ning mate this sum­mer. But, my favorite judge­ment comes at the end, from Rudy Van­der­Lans:

What does Opti­ma say about Sen­a­tor McCain? Noth­ing. It prob­a­bly says more about the design­er than any­thing else. Who, except design­ers, would judge a can­di­date by the type­face?

Gov. Eliot Spitzer has been caught on a fed­er­al wire­tap arrang­ing to meet with a high-priced pros­ti­tute at a Wash­ing­ton hotel last month, accord­ing to a law enforce­ment offi­cial and a per­son briefed on the inves­ti­ga­tion.

There are a lot of unan­swered ques­tions at the moment, but that pret­ty much says it all.

Slate points out the irony that Spitzer’s was brought down by the same inves­ti­ga­tion tac­tics he pio­neered as a pros­e­cu­tor. And, the Smok­ing Gun pulls an inter­est­ing tid­bit out of the com­plaint:

…the affi­davit notes that after her appoint­ment with Client-9 end­ed, “Kris­ten” spoke with a Emper­ors Club book­er, who said that she had been told that Client-9 “would ask you to do things that, like, you might not think were safe…” “Kris­ten” respond­ed by say­ing, essen­tial­ly, that she could han­dle guys like that.

Now that Barack Oba­ma is the front-run­ner for the Demo­c­ra­t­ic nom­i­na­tion, there seems to be a lot of fun­ny web­sites pop­ping up. None is more ridicu­lous (and took more work to pro­duce) than this:

“Barack­u­la is a short polit­i­cal hor­ror rock musi­cal about young Barack Oba­ma hav­ing to stave off a secret soci­ety of vam­pires at Har­vard when he was induct­ed into pres­i­den­cy at the Har­vard Law Review in 1990.”

If you’re going to vote tomor­row on Super Tues­day, con­sid­er doc­u­ment­ing your expe­ri­ence for all to see. The Polling Place Pho­to Project, an exper­i­ment in cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism that “encour­ages vot­ers to cap­ture, post and share pho­tographs of this year’s pri­maries, cau­cus­es and gen­er­al elec­tion.”